Cinefication Campaign

In an attempt to educate and uplift the largely illiterate Russian peasantry, teams of agitators and mechanics were sent into the countryside with film prints and projectors, often to places where films had never been shown. Although it did succeed in enlarging the rural audience for Soviet films, it was heavily criticized and fell well short of its stated goals, largely because of a lack of funding and reliance on poor equipment. The program was ended in the late 1920s, but as some of its advocates argued that avant-garde films were too complicated for peasant audiences and films such as Bed and Sofa (1927, Abram Room) were too immoral, the campaign can be seen as laying the groundwork for socialist realism.

Civil War (1918-1921)

The Russian Civil War (1918-1921) was fought between the Red Army (Bolsheviks) and the White Army (anti-communists). Shortly after the October Revolution, armies began forming against Lenin’s Soviet Council of People’s Commissars, calling themselves Whites in opposition to Lenin’s Reds. On March 3rd, 1918 Russia signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany surrendering Ukraine, Poland, Finland and the Baltic States, and leading to battle between the Red Army and the liberated states. By 1921, Bolshevik rule had been established throughout the Soviet Union. The country was in ruins with millions dead from disease and starvation that led to the Great Famine (1921). It would take the Soviet Union over ten years to recover from this devastation. Two films that address this war are Arsenal and Storm Over Asia.

Collectivization

Adopted by Stalin in 1928 and carried out until 1940, this policy combined individual labor into collective farms. Collectivization was designed to be a solution to the problem of the equal distribution of agricultural resources. To help with the implementation, 25,000 industrial workers were sent to help with the collectivization process, with many forcing farmers to join. The surge of production and unfortunate drought resulted in famine between 1929-1932. Stalin blamed the "kulaks" as grain hoarders and subsequently cut food rations to many suspected thieves resulting in mass starvation. Although this process did accelerate the country's economic and industrial development, millions suffered and died in the process. In this period, the tractor became a powerful cinematic motif of collectivization and progress (as in Old and New and Earth).

Commissiarat of Enlightenment

Soviet ministry created following the October Revolution to oversee the fields of education and culture, including the film industry. A.V. Lunacharskii held the office of Minister from 1917 to 1929.

Communism

A political ideology derived from The Communist Manifesto published by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848. It is characterized by its advocacy for the abolition of social classes and privately owned property. The theory argues that capitalism needs to be abolished in order to end the exploitation of the proletariat. Marxist theory asserts that socialism is the preliminary stage that leads to communism.

For More Info: Douzinas, Costas and Slavoj Zizek. The Idea of Communism. London: Verso, 2010. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Pons, Silvio and Robert Service (ed.). A Dictionary of 20th-Century Communism. Princeton: University Press, 2010.

Comrade

Initially used by the Bolsheviks to address revolutionary and Communist sympathizers, the term became associated with members of the working class. By the late 1920’s, Comrade was being used as a synonym for the pronoun “Mr.” and continued that association until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Constructivism

_Constructivism is an art movement, emerging from Russian Futurism, that
rejects autonomous art in favour of art for social and political
purposes. Taking from the Futurists an affinity for machine aesthetics,
constructivism proposed the “artist as engineer, constructing art
objects through a rational process of enquiry and experimentation”
(Aitkins 13). Due to an emphasis on the industrial, both ideological
content and structure were compiled with the precision of a machine,
their parts combined with mathematical care, the artistic equivalent of
“precision engineering” (Kepley 134) While this practice was applied to
areas outside of art, including design and furniture (Kepley 134), film
became one of its dominant applications. Cinema interested the
Constructivists because of the inherent mechanical apparatus of the
camera; it represented the ideal medium to carry the message of
modernization to the Soviet people during the transitional period of the
revolution. The result was an adoption of the machine as modern visual
aesthetic , necessary as Kepley argues, as “a film must manifest
efficiency in order to advocate efficiency” (Kepley 136).

Extending from formalist beliefs, Constructivist technique was valued
for its ideological possibilities. As Bordwell states, “because all
human response was seen as based on a scientifically determinable
process, the Constructivists considered that an artwork could be
calculated to elicit a particular reaction” (Bordwell 137). This caused a
new appreciation of popular art, such as film, for its accessibility
and extended ideological range. Constructivist art was integral for the
post-revolution as it could be configured as educational propaganda for
the new Communist society.

The constructivist ethos was
championed most heavily by the journal LEF, the Left Front of the Arts
who claimed the basis of cinematic art is not the creator but the
material. This ethos placed less emphasis on the bourgeois individual
artist, and centred itself on the collective and the accessibility of
film outside the elite. This influential journal published
Constructivst writings by, amongst others, Osip Brik, Sergei Eisenstein
and Dziga Vertov; the latter an ardent and true practitioner of the
constructivist methods. Vertov's films boldly embrace mechanization,
utilizing an impressionistic formal quality and montage to emphasize
movement through speed and rhythm of editing. His belief was that
through mechanized movement, a creative joy could be instilled and
associated with industrial labour, thereby invoking a kinship with the
machines so prevalent to a modern Russia, and thus influence an enhanced
industrial output.

For More Info:Aitken, Ian. European Film Theory and Cinema :A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Print.Kepley, Vance. “Mr. Kuleshov in the Land of the Modernists”. The Red Screen :Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema, ed Lawton, Anna. . London; New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell. Film History :An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. Print.

Contrast Editing

Contrast as a montage device involves the comparison of two antithetical images in order to force the viewer to constantly compare their differences, with one therefore reinforcing the other. Pudovkin gives the example of the depiction of a poor starving man in contrast to the senseless gluttony of a rich man; a greater emotional impact is achieved by reinforcing the specificity of their differences and placing the images in contrast with each other (Pudovkin 62).

At the beginning of this scene from Strike, note how the stockholders are contrasted with the striking workers they are oppressing.

Cultural Revolution

The campaign is usually considered to have begun in 1928, although the term was used in attacks on Sovkino, and to a lesser extent Mezhrabpom, studios as early as 1927. The focus of the attacks was on the production of overtly commercial films and of the use of “specialists” (those with experience in the pre-Revolutionary industry) or “fellow travelers” who had returned from exile, such as Yakov Protozanov. Following a Party Conference on Cinema in 1928, the arguments of the Cultural Revolution were largely accepted, leading to a series of purges in the film industry in 1929-1930, including the studios VUFKU, Sovkino and Mezhrabpom-Rus, as well as the ARRK and ODSK groups, of bourgeois and formalist elements. A short term result was a drop in film production and a discouraging of formal experimentation. In the long term, the campaign can be seen as opening the way for socialist realism.

Fabula/ Siuzhet

Fabula and siuzhet are terms created by the Russian Formalists to define the difference in what we now consider plot and story. The fabula is what we perceive as the story through a structure comprised of causal, temporal and spatial links. The arrangement and presentation of the fabula in the film, in order to stylistically represent story events, is the syuzhet, or plot. Take for example the murder in a detective story. The fabula would begin with the murder, initiating the story, but the syuzhet would withhold the information of the murderer until the end in order to create a narrative structure concerning the investigation of the crime.

For More Info: Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Print.

February Revolution, 1917

_The first of two revolutions to take place in 1917, the February
Revolution involved the ending of Tsarist rule and the
Romanov Dynasty, with the establishment of a provisional government. This
interim government was unable to address the growing strength of the
Bolshevik party, leading to the October Revolution later that same year.
Central causes of the Revolution can be traced back to a variety of social and
economic problems, including the
devastation from World War I, famine, and industrial unrest.

For More Info: Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Russian Revolution. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Raleigh, Donald (ed.). Russia’s Second Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

FEKS

The Workshop of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) was organized in 1921 by a group of young artists and performers, several still in their teens, associated with the Petrograd theatrical avant-garde. Led by future film directors Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg and Sergei Yutkevich, FEKS combined training of actors with producing collective artistic work. Their manifesto, Eccentrism, was published in 1922, and the group eventually transformed into a film collective. They debunked the notion of high art, labeling authors as “inventor-builders” and acting as “mechanized action,” seeking inspiration in popular art forms such as the circus, the music hall and Hollywood slapstick comedy.

Five Year Plans

Stalin began a series of national campaigns designed to encourage swift economic development in the Soviet Union beginning in 1928. The plans followed the guidelines set out by the Communist Party Central Committee for economic development. Following War Communism and the NEP, the Five Year Plans were designed to strengthen Soviet power in agriculture, industry (specifically electricity) and production, along with health, transportation, and education. Stalin’s primary goal was to build heavy industry and the early plans addressed this issue. The First Plan (1928-32) focused on the collectivization of agriculture, which brought large numbers into the city to live and work. The Second Plan (1933-1937) focused on heavy industry (steel, coal, oil) in order to compete with the output of European nations.

Fogel, Vladimir (1902-1929)

Starting out as part of Lev Kuleshov’s film collective, he played parts in Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of theBolsheviks (1924) and The Death Ray (1925), and then had his first lead role in Chess Fever (1925, Vsevelod Pudovkin). With his matinee idol looks and acting versatility, he quickly established himself as a star. Among his most memorable performances were as Dennin the killer in By the Law (1926, Kuleshov) and Volodia, the “other man” in Bedand Sofa (1927, Abram Room). Although he only appeared in 13 films, almost all of them are among the most important of the period. These include The Case of the Three Million (1926, Yakov Protozanov), Miss Mend (1926, Boris Barnet), The Girl with the Hat Box (1927, Boris Barnet), The End of St. Petersburg (1927, Vsevelod Pudovkin) and The House on Trubnaya (1928, Boris Barnet). Suffering from depression, he committed suicide in 1929.IMDB page

Formalism

Viktor Shklovskij

_Formalism was introduced through the works of literary theorists such as Roman
Jakobson, Viktor Scklovskij, Osip Brik, Boris Eichenbaum, Vladimir Propp
and Boris Arvatov (Aitkin 6). Opposed to philosophical abstractions,
formalist thinkers believe that the study of art should be “scientific
and autonomous”, focusing on its systems and structures to determine the
“literariness” of an object; the formal elements that make the text
constitute art (Eagle 3). Essentially rooted in what is now known as
semiotics, formalist thought implied an abstract realm of signs, with
both “Representational Function” (i.e- the text explicitly representing
the outside world) and “Autonomous/Aesthetic Function (i.e- the text
implying a new concept through means of relation) ( Eagle 3). The
theorist Sklovskij, an important formalist thinker, contended that the
essence of art therefore lay in the aesthetic function's ability to
renew “perceptions about 'reality' which daily life tended to
automatize” (Eagle 4). By means of defamiliarizing what is familiar to
the reader, certain subtleties will be uncovered by the necessity of a
deeper analytic examination, which in turn creates new forms of thought
and new insights on existence.

The creation of formalism was
integral to the development of early Soviet film for its major
examinations of the film as an art form and for its correlation to the
work of the filmmakers from the Soviet Avant-Garde. By placing emphasis
on the “meaning” of each shot, the composition of a frame could contain,
by means of its formal elements, associational images and emotions.
The use of “associative detail”, filmic elements which emphasize the
function of an image as an asbstract semantic sign is used frequently by
Soviet filmmakers and is a key element toward the evolution of the
theory of montage (Eagle 7).